NSA Official Faces Prison for Leaking to Newspaper

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NSA Official Faces Prison for Leaking to Newspaper

A former senior National Security Agency official was slammed with a 10-count indictment Thursday after allegedly leaking top secret information to a reporter at a national newspaper.

Thomas Andrews Drake, 52, was a high-ranking NSA employee with access to signals intelligence documents when he repeatedly leaked classified information to the unnamed reporter, who ran stories based on the leaks between February 2006 and November 2007, the indictment alleges.

Fox News is reporting that the journalist was Siobhan Gorman, who worked at the time for the Baltimore Sun and is now a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, which is published by Fox parent corporation News Corp.

According to the indictment, Drake exchanged hundreds of e-mails with the reporter, and the two met in the Washington, D.C., area half a dozen times. Drake also researched stories for the journalist, sending e-mail to other NSA employees asking questions, and accessing classified documents to obtain information.

Drake even "reviewed, commented on, and edited drafts, near final and final drafts" of the reporter's articles, according to the government.

He later allegedly shredded documents and lied about his activity to federal agents investigating the leaks.

Articles Gorman published at the time dealt with the threat of cyberattacks and the NSA's struggles to modernize its data collection and sifting technology. A February 2006 article discussed the failure of a $300 million NSA project management system and other mission-critical software programs the agency needed to combat terrorism and attacks.

Another article published in May 2006 discussed a collection program called ThinThread that was abandoned in favor of another program called Trailblazer. Privacy safeguards that were inherent in ThinThread and not in Trailblazer were dropped as a result. Gorman wrote:

NSA managers did not want to adopt the data-sifting component of ThinThread out of fear that the Trailblazer program would be outperformed and "humiliated," an intelligence official said.

Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials.

Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.

Gorman attributed information in the articles to anonymous sources and, in at least one article published in March 2007, said the source was given anonymity because the document discussed was "classified" in nature.

Drake was charged in the U.S. District Court of Maryland with five counts of willfully retaining classified national security documents, as well as obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI.

"Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here – violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information – be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer in a statement.

Drake's attorney did not immediately return a call for comment.

“The damage to our national security caused by leaks won’t stop until we see a couple of perpetrators in orange jump suits,” said Senator Kit Bond (R - Missouri), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a press release praising the indictment. Bond called on the Justice Department to prosecute other whistleblowers, such as Thomas Tamm, whom Bond said should be following Drake to federal court.

Tamm is a former Justice Department prosecutor who revealed in 2008 that he was a source for a story the New York Times broke in December 2005 about the warrantless wiretapping program the NSA was conducting with authorization from the Bush administration.

Drake's leaking to the Baltimore Sun began around November 2005, according the the indictment, when a former congressional staffer who had a "close, emotional friendship" with Drake asked him to speak with the reporter, now identified as Gorman. Drake had provided the congressional staffer with classified and unclassified information while the person worked for Congress, and after the staffer retired in May 2002.

Drake opened a Hushmail e-mail account to contact Gorman, and volunteered to provide information about the NSA. Drake instructed the reporter to open her own Hushmail account so they could communicate covertly.

Hushmail is a Canada-based encrypted e-mail service that allows account holders to communicate securely with a client-side Java encryption applet. But Threat Level previously reported that the company has subverted its own encryption to help U.S. and Canadian authorities gain access to customer e-mail, in response to court orders. It's unclear if the FBI used that capability in investigating Drake.

Gorman agreed that information gathered from Drake would be attributed in articles to a "senior intelligence official" and that Drake would never be her only source for information.

Drake worked as a contractor for the NSA in 1991 until August 2001 when he became an employee in the NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate as Chief of the Change Leadership and Communications Office. A year later, he became technical leader in the Directorate of Engineering.

His work focused not on signals intelligence itself, but on developing efficiencies in the agency. In November 2007 the agency suspended his security clearance, and in April 2008 he resigned in lieu of termination, according to court records.

When government investigators searched Drake's home computer in November 2007 they found copies of classified documents, including internal NSA e-mails headed "Volume is our Friend," "Trial and Testing," "the Collections Sites," and "What a Success."

Updated 15:00 to identify the reporter who allegedly worked with Drake.